


Hair

by AlmesivaMoonshadow



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies), karate kid 3
Genre: 70s, Background Relationships, Bipolar Disorder, Canonical Character Death, Character Analysis, Character Study, College Era Terry Silver, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Baggage, Haunting, Heroes to Villains, Historical References, Identity Issues, Loss of Identity, Male Friendship, Memory Related, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Military Backstory, Nightmare Fuel, Other, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Psychological Trauma, References to Depression, References to Drugs, References to Illness, Slurs, Survivor Guilt, Trauma Bonding, Veterans, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:48:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29722326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlmesivaMoonshadow/pseuds/AlmesivaMoonshadow
Summary: Commemorating the dead is a tricky thing - especially when the concept of remembrance consumes one's soul. Luckily for him, Terry Silver had very little soul left.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	Hair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AtmosphericFantasy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtmosphericFantasy/gifts).



> “Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.” (Guy de Maupassant)

* * *

Terry Silver's hair, in it's natural state, was of the curlier persuasion - so as such, upon returning from Vietnam, he had a head full of wavy spirals.

And walking around campus in '72, he felt slightly uneasy in his own skin. Like something was deeply flawed and amiss. Fundamentally just not there. Wrong. Sure, he was academically admirable, an exemplary student, always diligent, always active, taking his extracurriculars with the utmost dedication and seriousness, honing his karate like one would hone and polish a weapon, becoming every Dean's favourite, passing every subject and every exam in record timing, with flying colors, as they say, and leaving nothing to chance. One would describe him as an overachiever and it wasn't a point he would argue or try and deny. Terry knew he was an overachiever and saw no shame in that whatsoever, in fact, it was more of a complement to him. An epithet he wore as a badge of honor. Openly. Without pause or the need to justify himself. He had a lot to accomplish. A lot to make up for and coming back from the war left him with a feeling akin to lack of purpose regardless of what and how much he did. Lack of focus. Lack of comfort with his own self not even the occasional faculty backroom cocaine binge could fix. A feeling of emptiness he needed to fill up somehow, with anything, any way he knew how, as soon as he possible could lest he loose himself to the abyss of his own mind. One would subscribe it to trauma. Commonplace PTSD most vets managed to acquire out fighting. The often dreaded survivor's guilt. And while that wasn't entirely removed from the truth of the matter - there was more to it.

Terry Silver was haunted.

He tended to have his nightmares often - waking up in cold sweat in his dormitory shared by at least three other students was not so different to the military - it was merely the feeling of it that varied. Terry never screamed after such events. He never shouted. Never gave any notice of his troubled nightly experiences. He wasn't going to allow such mundane things to have control over him or effect him in any noticeable, external way. It was beneath him. He trained himself deliberately to remind himself it was beneath him. And that it had to stay that way. He'd merely turn around facing the wall and contemplate it all in the absolute silence of the room. That, or stare up at the ceiling mutely, unblinking. Ponytail visited him often during those nights. He'd see him in his dreams as vividly and as tangibly as a person made out of flesh and bone. His head always had a red, bleeding hole - the pitch black crimson substance of the reminder of his brain peeking out through the crack in his skull where the bullet smashed through his skull upon impact. His face obscured by the jungle foliage. Fitting, seeing how his body was never actually recovered or brought home for a proper burial and the honors he deserved. He was just left there. Exactly where he was executed. Down in the mud. Like some kind of animal. Funny that - how in after-mentioned reveries, Ponytail's hair was always immaculate. Perfectly gelled up and sleek. Well-groomed. Stylish. Just like it was in life. He always took such loving care of it, much to the chagrin of their commanding officers who always opted for a neat, tidy buzzcut to avoid any smart ideas about individuality _(they weren't Commies, after all)_ or lice among the personnel of privates _(Again, they weren't Commies.)_

Nothing changed.  
Not even when Terry was having nightmares about him.  
It was the same person - with the same mannerisms, same expressions, same voice, same everything.  
Even the identically cocksure, teasing grin he always had, alongside the moniker of a name Terry despised so much - even that was left unchanged.

_-"Eyo, Twig, where did I put my comb? Did you see it anywhere, man? Shit! Seemed to have lost it somewhere."-_

Ponytail's twisted, smiling spectre cheerfully asked in a particularly bad dream Terry had. He always had a small pocket comb at hand, his friend. Always fixing his jet-black, shiny, sleek strands. Always making sure nothing was amiss. That everything was in place. That he always looked his best, despite how much Kreese and the others teased him for it relentlessly. He took care of that comb more then he did any of his gear - his boots or his rifle or his hunting knife and it was probably on his body the day he was shot as well. Probably rotting away with the rest of his abandoned, forgotten remains. Intermingling with his bones and the soil and the grass beneath him, in a overgrown, derelict ditch somewhere, washed away by the rains and the seasonal monsoon. Those motherfucking Slopes and what they did to him. It was unforgivable. Inhumane. Base, low and animalistic. Fuck them. Fuck them. _Fuck them._

Terry didn't sleep that night.  
Or the night after.  
Or the next six months to come.  
He wasn't even sure how a person can survive that long without proper rest - but he did.  
Still attending his classes, his studies, as if living on autopilot, merely sifting through the motions.  
Practicing - attempting to sweat out the last vestige of weakness out of himself until nothing remained but determination.  
And he spent those evenings in front of the dormitory shared toilet mirror whenever he could, trying to figure himself out.  
His own hair grew past his shoulders in self-neglected, but he brushed it off as a mere fashion choice.  
He even started to vaguely look like him in certain aspects, or maybe he was merely imagining it.  
Ponytail was never buried, but it was like Terry Silver became his graveyard instead.  
Carrying his memory around campus and that terrible, iron click of the trigger.  
When his skull was shot to smithereens in the finality of a single flash.

To cope with the memory of it all, Terry acquired a comb of his own, as identical as he could find, to the one Ponytail had.

Small, black - to be flipped open on the side, like a decorative switchblade.

That evening in the toilet he spent barely conscious of himself, yet fully in tune with what he was doing. This was a deliberate action. It wasn't done out of fear. Out of guilt. Out of necessity. Out of a lack of common sense. Out of some sort of emotional, subconscious coercion. No. Terry Silver was as aware of it as he was ever going to be as he carefully handled the comb and brushed his long, dark tresses to the side, slicking them back carefully, inch by inch, piece by piece, strand by strand, for what seemed like hours, until his unruly, curly, boyish mane was entirely subdued, tied neatly into a tail on the nape of his neck. Gone. Changed. Shifted. Did this constitute for loss of identity, psychologically speaking? Identity theft and split personalities, even? Self-diagnosed madness, in straight, layman, non-academic terms? Perhaps. Maybe. But, Ponytail _needed_ to come home. Somehow. Anyhow. Any way Terry could have humanly sought to bring him back - confounded and limited in every way but this one. _Looking like him._ Maybe even attempting to speak like him in certain ways if he could only practice and teach himself how to adopt his very way of being from past scraps of memory and sheer nostalgia alone. But he would. He would do it. Resurrection wasn't a medical or scientific possibility, but the dead walked the earth with him that morning when he stepped out of his dormitory, fresh, new, prim and proper, standing tall, not a moment late, perfectly on time, and _aesthetically new and reformed_ , only to find the student campus body protesting returning Vietnam veterans and deep below the surface of his calm, collected, cool self, Terry was seething with enough rage to power a smaller city on impact of wrath alone, distracting himself from knocking someone out with a bare knuckle with a simple mantra. With a simple continued quote. _Where does he rest? Where's Ponytail's tomb? It's right here with me. Safe. Sound. Properly kept. Loved._

He merely smiled in satisfaction - never allowing the internal to become external.  
Someone spat at him in passing and Terry made a note to grin even wider out of sheer fucking spite, smoothing his hair back with his index finger.

His saunter was proud, poised - he walked into the promise of a new day eager - all prohibitions and feelings of inadequacy evaporating when he tightened the rubber holding his hair together mid-stride.

* * *

At the end of that work week, in between putting together his thesis on environmental defense, he immediately wrote to John - all the enthusiasm in the world guiding his pen, starting out with the introductory words _"Dear Captain. Something incredible has happened..."_


End file.
